Public research university in Portsmouth, on England's south coast, with work spanning palaeontology, animal cognition, cosmology and plastics research.
A Nature reassessment of 892 reef-building coral species classifies 340 of the 774 assessable ones, 44%, as threatened under IUCN Red List criteria. The findings predate the fourth global bleaching event of 2023-2025, as the authors themselves note.
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University of Portsmouth researchers found 63.7% of UK tourists with strong sustainability values would pay for carbon offsets, against 34.9% of the moderate group. Even in the strong-values group, more than a third did not say they would pay.
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Portsmouth-led researchers found the mantle recorded surface oxygen 3.4 to 3 billion years ago, up to 1.1 billion years before the Great Oxidation Event. Sulfur chemistry in apatite sealed inside zircon indicates oxidized surface material was already being carried down by some form of subduction, according to the Nature Geoscience study.
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Portsmouth and Casablanca researchers name Ctenosuchus tenuidens, a 170-million-year-old Moroccan crocodile relative with needle-thin teeth. Its teeth were too fine for large prey, the researchers say, so it probably ate shrimp and tiny fish.
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Wild African savanna elephants gesture intentionally, finds an Animal Cognition study that logged about 840 gestures in two South African parks. Its behavioural tests of intent put elephants, a lineage evolutionarily distant from primates, beside the apes in research on how gesture evolved.
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Physicists at Syracuse, Portsmouth and ENS in France argue in a paper accepted by JCAP that decoherence can strongly suppress false-vacuum tunnelling. The tools come from quantum computing, where scientists study the same effect to protect fragile information.
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University of Portsmouth-led physicists find, in a simplified model, that decoherence can suppress quantum tunnelling and lock a field in its false vacuum. The Higgs field, which may itself sit in a false vacuum, is the example that motivates the work, though the study does not model it.
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Ninety-two percent of cafe customers surveyed could not tell whether a cup was already costing them money, and the behavioural case for a mandated charge rests on a field experiment in three university cafes.
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